Failure sucks, Ashley Good says bluntly. The founder of Fail Forward has little use for self-help books that tell people to celebrate failure or embrace failure.

“It’s absolutely OK to feel badly. It’s hard-wired into us,” she affirmed during a break in Toronto’s first conference devoted to “failing well.” What is not OK is allowing the shame, guilt and self-recrimination to fester, paralyzing a person or an organization.

Yet that is the norm. People who slip or stumble draw the wrong lessons: Stay out of sight, don’t take any more risks, don’t share your ideas.

The 31-year-old geophysicist, international development worker and management consultant has seen this destructive pattern so often — in business, government, academe and the non-profit sector — that she’s made it her life’s work to change the culture of failure.

Good members the moment the penny dropped. She was working for Engineers with Borders in Africa. She had been seconded to a project funded by the United Nations in northern Ghana. When she arrived, her new colleagues told her about the flaws in the project and outlined what needed to be done to fix them. But when a UN evaluator came from Rome, they clammed up. They said they could use more laptops and SUVs, but otherwise everything was going fine.

She listened in astonishment. “Why didn’t tell him what you told me?” she asked.

“We like our jobs,” the project leader said.

If they’d only opened up, the deficiencies could have been rectified, the project could have been strengthened and future projects could have been designed more intelligently, she thought. She came back to Canada grappling with three questions: Why wasn’t it safe to be honest? Why didn’t organizations reduce the risk of admitting failure? Why was society so unwilling to discuss the issue?

She read as much as she could about neuroscience, psychology and workplace culture. She met people who had dared to stick their necks out to get others in their organizations to take responsibility for their mistakes. She listened and learned and boiled it all down to a theory of intelligent failure.

“It failed,” she recounted. (It didn’t really; Engineers without Border still uses and disseminates its contents.)

Determined to practice what she preached, she used the setback to adjust her plan. In 2011, she founded Fail Forward, a consulting firm that offers clients a set of tools to deal with failure constructively.

This time, she seems to have got it right. She has taken her message to Scandinavia, continental Europe and all over the United States. She won the 2013 Innovating Innovation Award from the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey and Co.

Wednesday’s conference at the MaRS Centre was designed as a “crash course” for neophytes.

The single most important — and most difficult — step an individual can take, Good explained, is to share failure, talk about what went wrong and figure out how to avoid similar mistakes. “It is the most effective way to distance yourself from the shame.”

The second key to success is to unlearn a lifetime of conditioning. “School teaches us there’s a right answer and if you don’t get it you’re bad or stupid,” she said. “We turn that idea of failure on it head. First you accept that failure is going to happen. Then you recognize that you have a choice whether to react negatively or positively”

Good knows there are people who are naturally resilient. They are the lucky few, she contends. Most people need to learn how to bounce back when they have disappointed themselves or their boss.

Approximately 200 participants attended the all-day session. There were bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, academics, professionals and non-profit workers. Good, who had never organized a conference before, recruited three speakers who exemplified her philosophy: Mount Sinai emergency physician Brian Goldman, Toronto neuroscientist Mandy Wintink and American philanthropist Laurie Michaels. She devoted the rest of the day to skill development workshops and brainstorming sessions. She isn’t scheduling any more events yet. “I’ll see if it creates the change I was hoping for. I want to learn from what worked and what didn’t.”

She has done a lot of that in the past year. She has learned that managing an organization isn’t her strong suit. She has learned the importance of collaborating with like-minded people and organizations. And she has learned to pick herself up and dust herself off a few times. “I sometimes think I start to feel too fine, too soon.”

Carol Goar's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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